The invention relates to a method for exchanging supporting or driving rollers in a continuous casting plant that has roller paths arranged opposite each other so as to guide the strand, as well as to apparatus for carrying out this method.
The supporting and driving rollers in continuous casting plants, in particular in casting plants for steel strands, are machine parts that are subjected to extremely great wear. Their period of use is relatively short compared with other machine parts used in a continuous casting plant. For this reason the supporting and driving rollers have to be exchanged for new ones or overhauled ones rather frequently when the plant is maintained. If the supporting or driving rollers fail, they have to be substituted within the shortest possible time.
In known continuous casting plants, either a number of supporting and driving rollers are mounted in segments of the stand or they are mounted together in a one-part roller stand. The exchange of a roller is carried out in a plant of this kind by removing the segment of the stand carrying the damaged roller or the one-part roller stand from the continuous casting plant and bringing it to a repair place, where a new roller is installed in the stand part. In the meantime a spare stand part having intact rollers is installed in the continuous casting plant. The exchange of rollers according to this method has significant disadvantages, consisting e.g. in that the exchange of a stand carrying a plurality of rollers requires a good deal of time and is a lot of work, and in that the precise alignment of the segment of the stand or the roller into the strand guide, relative to the adjacent stand parts carrying rollers, which is of eminent importance, takes a lot of time and may lead to faults in the strand guide at the transitions to the neighbouring stand parts. Also, keeping a store of the roller-carrying stand parts is rather complex and involves a high expenditure of funds, especially in bow-type continuous casting plants or in bending/straightening plants, whose arcuate part corresponds to a transition curve.